Multilingual database creation system and method

Abstract

A method and apparatus for translating a document segment in a first language into a document segment in a second language. A document segment can be text in the form of words or phrases in a document. The invention can be used where there is insufficient information to directly translate the document in the first language into the document in the second language. The invention includes providing an association between the document segment in the first language and a document segment in each of a plurality of third languages, providing an association between sample segments in the second language each of which corresponds to a segment in each of the plurality of third languages, identifying at least two sample segments that are identical as a deduced association segment; and associating the deduced association segment with the document segment in the first language.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 024,473, filed Dec. 21, 2001 now abandoned and claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 276,107 filed Mar. 16, 2001, and U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 299,472 filed Jun. 21, 2001, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]This invention relates to a method and apparatus for creating a multilingual database that may be used to convert content from on state to a second state.BACKGROUND[0003]Devices and methods for automatically translating documents from one language to another are known. However, these devices and methods often fail to accurately translate documents from one language to another, can consume large amounts of time and can be inconvenient to use. In addition to human-based translators, other known devices include commercially available machine translation software. These known systems have flaws that render them ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]One object of the present invention is to facilitate the efficient translation of documents from one language or state to another language or state by providing a method and apparatus for creating and supplementing cross-idea association databases. These databases generally associate data in a first form or state that represents particular ideas or pieces of information with data in a second form or state that represents the same ideas or pieces of information.

[0013]Another object of the present invention is to facilitate the translation of documents from one language or state to another language or state by providing a method and apparatus for creating a second document comprising data in a second state, form, or language, from a first document comprising data in a first state, form, or language, with the result that the first and second documents represent substantially the same ideas or information.

Problems solved by technology

However, these devices and methods often fail to accurately translate documents from one language to another, can consume large amounts of time and can be inconvenient to use.

These known systems have flaws that render them susceptible to errors, slow speed and inconvenience.

Known translation devices and methods cannot consistently return accurate translations for text input and therefore frequently require intensive user intervention for proof reading and editing.

Accurate machine translation is more complicated than providing devices and methods that make word-for-word translations of documents.

In these word-for-word systems, the translation often times makes little sense to readers of the translated document, as the word-for-word method results in wrong word choices and incoherent grammatical units.

These systems, known in the art as “Rule-Based” machine translation (MT) systems are flawed because there are so many exceptions to the rules that they cannot provide consistently accurate translation.

EBMT systems cannot provide accurate translation of a broad language because the databases of cross-language sentences are built manually and will always be predominantly “incomplete” Another flaw of EBMT systems is that partial matches are not reliably translated.

However, these efforts have not been successful in creating meaningful, accurate cross-language databases of any significant size.

None of these attempts use an algorithm that reliably and accurately distill the translations of a significant number of words and word-strings from a pair of translated documents.

Although this combination of approaches may yield a higher rate of accuracy than either system alone, the results remain inadequate for use without significant user intervention and editing.

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